Survivors of Canada’s notorious residential schools for native children will tell their stories Wednesday at a special panel at Queen’s Park.

Shirley Williams, a professor at Trent University, is a survivor of Canada’s residential schools for native children who will tell her story Wednesday at a special panel at Queen’s Park.

By:Louise BrownEducation Reporter, Published on Tue Sep 27 2011

By the time it was 7-year-old Shirley Williams’s turn to be sent off to residential school, her father had had enough.

After seeing the emotional damage such schools had caused his six older children, the Ojibwa father of nine struck a deal with the local priest in Wikwemikong reserve on Manitoulin Island: Let me keep Shirley until she’s 10 and I’ll school her here at home.

And so, when she left three years later by boat for the girls school where she would spend the next eight years, her Ojibwa roots were deep enough, her identity and language strong enough they could not be stripped away no matter how hard the school would try.

But she can still recall the sting of the strap for speaking Ojibwa to a cousin in the hall.

Today, at 72, Williams is a professor at Trent University and one of a number of survivors of Canada’s notorious residential schools for native children who will tell her story Wednesday at a special panel at Queen’s Park, part of a cross-cultural dialogue hosted by Lt.-Gov. David Onley.

“It was like living in jail in a foreign land,” said Williams, who attended St. Joseph’s Girls’ School in Spanish, Ont., until she quit at 16, an act she called “liberation.” “We were always hungry and we couldn’t talk to the older girls, even our own sisters — but if parents didn’t send us they could go to jail for up to a year.”

But beyond the hardship and the homesickness, what these schools took away were the pillars of a person’s identity, she said.

“Your spirituality — the beliefs you follow — and your language. You can’t treat other people like that.

“We’re telling our stories so it will never happen again to any child.”

It’s the kind of awareness Justice Murray Sinclair of Manitoba says is key for Canadians to understand if they are to come to grips with the damage residential schools have caused some seven generations of native children.

Sinclair, an Ojibwa whose father attended residential school, is chair of Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, a court-ordered group set up to gather the stories of survivors of some 140 native residential schools, spread awareness of their impact and find ways to repair the broken relationship between aboriginals, the government, the churches and other Canadians. The commission was set up as part of a $4 billion class action settlement between former students and churches and Ottawa, and is halfway through its five-year mandate.

“It was schools that created the problem, so the answer lies in how we educate ourselves about what happened. Education is the answer, just as education was the problem,” Sinclair said Tuesday in a speech at Ryerson University.

It’s ironic, he noted, that aboriginals valued education so much they demanded it be written into their treaties, but the government considered natives so inferior that they set up schools to remove children from their parents’ influence.

“It’s beyond imagination how some of the children were treated,” said Sinclair. “Probably thousands of them died and their families were never told where they were buried, which is something we’re researching.”

“This is not just about aboriginal children being taken away from their community, but it is about how us, as a nation, and how it affected us to have people taken away at such a young age in the guise of doing what was thought to be right.

“We need to help all Canadians come to terms with this legacy and move forward.”

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